Lidia

She doesn't in the novel either. Though CQ and YX did talk about getting married and everyone assumed they were a couple since they lived together for so long, they never had any romantic/sexual physical intimacy.
I appreciated the fact that the YY loved her enough and wanted to marry her despite thinking she had been sleeping with YX in the past.

Rebirth is not season 2. It starts from where PA ended, but it is not a continuation of PA since it drops a lot of important plot points - the man in wheelchair with the jade thumb ring, the secret agents, the flower tattoo, all the character development of Chun'er etc.

As an audience member watching the drama, you do not care if the scenery is real or fake. What you want is to connect with the characters in the scene. If the actors are too cold to be able to emote and perform, that is a production issue. Nobody asked them to put actors in these harsh conditions, they should be able to ACT like they are cold since they are ACTORS.

Regarding the zooming in of the faces of the actors while they speak to the camera... it's the director's MO. It drove me to distraction in The Double, but at least there the actors did a better job at emoting.

I really want to watch PA again and pay more attention to the characters from the beginning, I'm not sure the red flags in Yan Xun were not there from the beginning. He was a hostage prince trying to survive by being affable. In the first episode he takes part in the hunt. Regading his revenge, I think he always knew that what he is doing is wrong, otherwise he wouldn't have tried to keep Chu Qiao in the dark. At the frozen lake he is thinking that he hadn't changed, it was Chu Qiao who misunderstoond him... and that's because he never voiced his opinions whenever he disagreed with her and deliberately made her assume they were on the same page.

For most of the drama, Chu Qiao is in survival mode, she has no time for romance and I think that if Yuwen Yue hadn't been attacked, she wouldn't have realised her feelings either. She put loyalty towards Yan Xun and her dream of ending slavery above everything else, including her own happiness. I'm happy the screenwriter didn't show love from her towards him in the first 40 episodes because a love story between a slave and her master is messed up.

I gave up after 10 episodes, I watched PA for the first time just before Rebirth started airing and it was a big mistake.

It took some time for me to sink into the storyline of PA since it looks old, the cinematography is lacking and I hated the wigs and the FL's hair. But once I passed the initial episodes, I could not stop watching. PA relies very much on the story it presents and the characters that evolve in a very human way in regards to the events that happen.

For the first time I had a case of SML syndrome. SML is a very complex and sympathetic character. Because awful things happened to him, when he plots his revenge you make allowances for his acts until the end when you realise you were in the red flag territory for a very long time, but you refused to see them. Absolutely fascinating storytelling.

In my opinion the problem with Rebirth is that it does not know what it wants to be, so the plot and character evolution (which were very important in PA) are all over the place. Although many cite the age difference between the leads and the inexperience of the FL as main issues, I think the script and some directorial choices are so bad that not even the OG cast could have saved the show. It resembles the mess that was the last season of GoT.

Rebirth cannot be a sequel to PA because there are a lot of plotlines that were central to PA but are completely abandoned here (eg the secret agents and the flower tattoo), but at the same time, the story in Rebirth starts where PA ended and the key events in PA are shown via flashbacks. If it's a new story, why start in the middle and not introduce your characters properly, only showing brief flashbacks from the 1st half of the story? Why would you care about the characters if you do not understand them or how they evolved and interact with each other?

I'm really sorry for LYR, I hope it will not affect his career and I'm grateful that because of Rebirth I watched PA, which had not been on my radar and was really good.

Viki has both versions with subtitles

The highest rated cdrama at this moment is Pursuit of Jade with 9.1. Untamed, Nirvana in Fire, Hidden Love, The Prisoner of Beauty, Love Like the Galaxy are 9 or 8.9. Princess Agents is not in their league.

Not sure, I haven't watched them either.

The novel Queen of No. 11 Agent (11处特工皇妃), which Princess Agents is based on, was found guilty of plagiarism in a 2018–2020 legal battle against author Xiao Ruse. It was proven that the author, Xiao Xiang Dong Er, copied significant plot lines and character details from the novel Novoland: Pearl Eclipse and others.

The show was affected by the plagiarism scandal hence no season 2 with the original cast and production team.

Although they were on opposite sides of the war, Zhuge Yue showed up and helped Chu Qiao whenever she needed help or was in a tricky situation. Their relationship shifted from master/slave or teacher/student to an equal friendship.

On the other hand, the relationship between Chu Qiao and Yan Xun had started going down once they escaped the capital. Yan Xun kept hiding what he was doing or gaslighting Chu Qiao since he knew she would not approve or argue with him. They also kind of stopped communicating.

Yan Xun found out that Chu Qiao kept meeting Zhuge Yu and was afraid he would lose her. He used the affection he knew Zhuge Yue had for Chu Qiao to lure him into a trap, making it seem that she was in mortal danger. She found out and told Yan Xun that she would never forgive him for using her loyalty to him and Zhuge Yue's feelings towards her and that his method of getting rid of his rival was foul and disgraceful.

Times were different, the standards were different. I hope for both the main leads' sakes that the director has steered clear of physical intimacy that might be viewed as problematic.

No, I don't think so. There haven't been any hints up until now. I'm wondering if they will pick up the Princess Agents explanation of how she came to possess her martial arts abilities or if they will find a new logic for this "sequel".

In the original novel, she transmigrated as a 27-year-old army woman from the special forces into a 10-year-old. Hence the battle knowledge and strategic thinking. In Princess Agents, she was trained since childhood by her mother, who was a leader of a spy network. During a fight after her mother was killed, she was injured, fell into the water and was found by human traffickers. When she woke up, she had amnesia and was a slave.

The context in which she became a general is also important: she together with a very small army defended one of the cities from Yanbei against all odds and managed to hold the fort until the main forces came back. Afterwards, she became the general of that small army of defenders.

I read that the novel had plagiarism issues and that was one of the reasons there wasn't a PA S2. The novelist had to rewrite the novel.

It's best to do so, this cdrama starts exactly where Princess Agents ended.

I think this is the new trailer
https://youtu.be/sWQM9KBcUSc?is=JRmTD-zmFworEijX

There should be a link to the epub version in the discussions board on mdl.

I saw this comment from MariaB earlier in this section
"Regarding the ages of the leads in the drama... this is what happens when you age people up and do not update the chronology of the plot.
We know the FL is 18 at the start of the drama, that the massacre happened 16 y ago and that the ML was 5 when his mom commited suicide ( I hope I am not misremembering it, a rewatch will clear this part up).
That would mean that FL's parents fled with her as an infant, which doesn't make sense when you factor in the conversation on NYE between FL's dad and Gen He when they decide the name of the baby just and also the alternate universe where ML is 5ish and FL was not born yet. In the novel, FL is 16, ML is 20.

Same thing happened in LLTG, the same screenwriter changed the circumstance under which the FL's mom went to war - in the book FL was 3, the war lasted approx 10 years, when the parents get home she's 14. However, in the drama FL's mom left after giving birth and they came back when FL was 15. From that point on, the characters would either say the war had been ongoing for 10 (like in the book) or 15 years (new timeline for drama), to the confusion of those at home who are trying to keep up with the chronology of the story."

It's in all cdramas. They make fun of it in A Dream Within A Dream